


you did not break me

by Naladot



Category: K-pop, Wonder Girls
Genre: Character Study, Gen, industry meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 05:24:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5993083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/Naladot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of renewal, revival, rebirth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you did not break me

When the concrete scrapes up the skin on her knees, Yeeun remembers how to believe in the dream.

 _The dream:_ the pie-in-the-sky crackpot fantasy she chased after through too many auditions. Stages that blur in her memory; inane songs sweeping the continent. Touching down on US soil. Going home. And now, getting the grit of New York City streets embedded in her skin for the sake of one song, her song.

It’s hard to tell: is the dream to succeed, or something else?

 

The onslaught of camera flashes paralyzes Sunmi for a heartbeat, and another one—then all the worries flood in, _will you look fat in this one, smile so they know you’re not a bitch, check your skirt to make sure you don’t look like a floozy, try not to look too dead in your eyes._ Another starlet steps up, and Sunmi steps away. It takes her a minute, before she remembers how to breathe.

What will they say this time, she wonders— _they_ , the indefinable mass of words and noises, disconnected from any individual human, a landslide of words burying her under their weight. Impossible to fight. After all, she chose this life, and she can’t fight disembodied words.

The only way to win against the cruelty of the public is to make them fall in love with you in spite of themselves.

 

Hyerim cuts her hair.

Call it a character transformation. Turning point. Symbolic action. Hyerim calls it a haircut.

In the build-up before a return to the public, the quiet months where everything rumbles in secret but has yet to bubble to the surface, Hyerim wants—desperately wants—to reinvent herself. Return to the stage for a redemption arc. Those who hated her will realize the error of their ways, and fall in love with her. This is her chance.

But all that is just the story she tells herself. Inside remains the girl who sat down at a fan meeting and forced herself not to cry when no one lined up for her signature.

So she cuts her hair. Maybe it’s more than just a haircut.

 

Lyrics pour out of Yubin’s pen on their own accord. She gets dumped and she writes. She dyes her hair blonde and she writes. She runs out into the street in Seoul in the middle of the night and looks up at the pale glow of the stars and staggers under the weight of a comeback (renewal, reboot, rebirth) and she writes.

Pop idols are pretty dolls picked out for the stage. Arranged and posed. Pop idols do not get the legitimacy they crave. Yubin knows.

Yubin also knows that they spent years enduring the disinterest of American audiences and the amnesia of the audiences at home, and before that they tasted ultimate success, and before that were countless disappointments suffered before they were old enough to understand that their dreams were only a footnote to concerns of profit margins and industry expansion. And in spite of all of that, they are still here.

Yubin keeps writing.


End file.
